| This project outlines, through a discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of sadistic and masochistic manifestations of embodiment as forms of bad faith, relationships to clothing, especially those conditioned by the fashion industry. Through an analysis of the concept of a disguise, I argue that the fashion industry encourages consumers to play what I call a game of fashion. This game involves hiding from one's freedom through self-deception while interacting with seemingly replaceable others. Clothing enables one to engage in a two-fold disguise - hiding one's freedom from oneself and evading intersubjective relations with others. In bad faith, one wears the self falsely while immersing oneself in a game of false interactions with others.;Bad faith is a two-fold assault on the self and the basic make-up of social life. Within the contemporary milieu of Western consumer society, fashion is a ready accessory for the performance of bad faith. This study is an examination of such phenomena.;A contemporary attitude toward clothing, or fashion, is that particular garments are able to "remake" the self - as if what adorns the body were all there is - and that it can hide the self through such adornment because the "real self" supposedly exists elsewhere. This perspective on fashion, and by extension, the body, depends on a Cartesian severing of mind and body - the exact attitude that informs bad faith. These two approaches to fashion are examples of assertions of the self as a material thing on one hand and the assertion of the self as a complete transcendence on the other. Both are forms of bad faith.;Instead of thinking of fashion as a mask beneath which there is either nothing or the body beyond which there is the real transcendent self, I argue for thinking of clothing as a veil where the garment naturally conceals through acts of revelation, but what is concealed and what is revealed are never complete. Such a conception involves maintaining a distinction between public and private, while acknowledging there being something beneath that could be known and, through the cultivation of intersubjective relations, offer a richer understanding of the ways in which clothing affects intimate relationships. |
